The expert put down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair.
“You are so close to the thing that you are continually losing the perspective, Dick,” he said earnestly. “You are going on the supposition that those New York looters are trying first one thing and then another. That doesn’t follow at all. For all you know, they may be gunning for you in half a dozen different ways this blessed minute—as they probably are. Assume, for the sake of the argument, that this whiskey scheme could be worked; I know you say it can’t, but suppose it could: can you conceive of any expedient that would be more certain to kill your traffic, wipe out your earnings, smash your securities, and put you on the toboggan slide generally?”
“Oh, no; if it could be worked.” Maxwell’s answer this time was less confidently derisive.
“All right; now that you’ve come that far, I’ll say this: it can be worked, and I’m here to tell you that it has been worked. Your railroad is practically an inebriate asylum in the making, right now, Richard. Half of your force has already fallen off the water chariot, and the other half is scared to death at the thought of what the drunken half may do.”
Maxwell pushed away his dessert untasted.
“You have the proof of this, Calvin?” he broke out.
“I have some proof, and Tarbell is getting more. You’ve been blind. You didn’t want to admit that your house of discipline was tumbling about your ears, and you’ve been shutting your eyes to the plain facts. For example: you may or may not be the only man in the service who doesn’t know that those two freight engineers—the one who was killed and the other—who overran their orders and smashed into the passenger at Lobo Cut this morning were just plain drunk!”
“What’s that? It—it can’t be, Calvin!”
“But it is,” insisted the big man across the table. “It is common talk among your own men; so common that it reached out and hit me—an outsider.”
The superintendent drank his small coffee at a single gulp and flung his napkin aside.